Eisenmac

Thanks for posting this interview. Excellent information that complements interviews with Neil Young by The Absolute Sound and Audiostream. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the next year. The positive thing is that friends of mine are already talking about PONO and higher quality audio. I was explaining more about this to a friend who is the music director at our excellent local public radio station. This station, WNCW.org, also has an excellent in-house recording studio that produces some terrific recordings from visiting artists. I've spoken with their engineer about his work that he records at 24/96 and he is hopeful that more music lovers will become aware of better quality recordings and playback systems. Any awareness of the availability of higher quality and less compressed recordings can only be helpful. I hope the naysayers give this a chance and instead use this as an opportunity to educate those that are not aware of what is available and what is possible. Get your friends to sit down in front of your system or let them listen through some high quality headphones. I've played Neil Young's "Harvest" to friends at 24/192 and they've all been impressed. Thanks for what you do Chris.

Wow, I sold my AR9's in 1984 to purchase a pair of Acoustat 1+1s. Those old ARs were my first pair of decent speakers after I sold a pair of JBL L65s.

I stream all the time from MOG and Spotify and never have any issues. Works great from iPad, iPhone. I have a robust home network with apple airport extreme router. I have apple tv connected with gigabit Ethernet and wifi and both work fine. Still nothing like a wired Ethernet connection. Also use Sonos, Squeezebox Duet and Escient Fireball on my network wirelessly. Great to have option of AirPlay and streaming from Mac mini controlled by remote app.

Used it yesterday on my iPad and streamed some lossless 16/44 files. Will be interesting to see how this expands with more titles. But it does tend to crash my iPod 1 when I open it.

Totally annoying! What's distraction. At least we can delete or skip this , except it's a good track otherwise.

sitting side by side on my desk in front of me. My late 2009 Mini is my Music Server and I put in a 500 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive and 8 GB of RAM. As I type this reply it is currently running Audirvana (free version) and playing an album of 24/96 files. I have a free fan speed app called SMC Fan Control that sits in the top menu that constantly shows fan speed and CPU temp. It's currently showing only 1627 RPM on the fan which is inaudible unless your ear is up to it. Many hard drives make more noise. I also happen to have Safari browser, Adobe Reader open while playing these files. My other Mini is a late 2011 model with the same hard drive and 8 gb of Ram. I plan to up this to 16 GB of RAM since prices have dropped to under $100 for 16GB currently at Amazon. I currently have a lot of applications open and the fan speed is 1804 RPM. So I would concur that fan speed is rarely an issue. Upgrading RAM and hard drives on the pre unibody aluminum Minis is a bit of a pain but good guides are available at iFixit.com. You can currently purchase 8 GB of RAM for $40 or less. I plan to put a 90 GB SSD OCZ Vertex 3 in the 2009 Mini that I use mainly as my music server. I have two external 2 TB Hard Drives connected to it by USB and a D-Link 323 NAS that has two 2 TB hard drives. I am still running 10.6.8 Snow Leopard on my 2009 and 10.7.3 Lion on my 2011 Mini. I've connected my TC Near Impact Twin FW audio interface to both Minis and have listened with speakers and my Sennheiser 580s to many high res and regular 16/44 files and can not tell a difference in sound quality. But I'm sure other listeners have different experiences depending on OS, audio interface and systems. All in all I've been very happy with my Minis. But I would definitely add at least 8 GB RAM to whatever you purchase and if possible would add a SSD. I would also recommend a FAST external full size CD-DVD optical drive to rip your CDs. I buy $25.00 OEM Pioneer drives and put them in a 5.25" external case. If you purchase a Mini with a built in optical drive you'll find they're quite slow. My external drives rip at roughly 20-25X while internal Mini drive rips at 5X.

This favorite free application that many on CA use has just had a major update. Thought I'd pass this information along. I haven't had a chance to check out the changes and improvements but hope to have time this weekend to look it over. I use it on my Macs along with other audio editing programs. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/features-2.0 Here's the information from their website. "New Features in Audacity 2.0 Audacity 2.0 is our current version. It has dozens of new features, developed in the 1.3 series. It replaces all previous versions, especially 1.2.6 and 1.3.14. See New Features in 1.3 for changes during the 1.3 series. See also Release Notes for more details. Some of the major changes in 2.0.0 over 1.2.6 are: Many effects significantly improved, especially Equalization, Noise Removal and Normalize. Vocal Remover now included plus GVerb on Windows and Mac. VAMP analysis plug-ins now supported. Improved label tracks with Sync-Lock Tracks feature in the Tracks Menu. Multiple clips per track. Tracks and selections can be fully manipulated using the keyboard. Many more keyboard shortcuts. New Device Toolbar to manage inputs and outputs. Timer Record feature. New Mixer Board view with per-track VU meters. Automatic Crash Recovery in the event of abnormal program termination. Fast "On-Demand" import of WAV/AIFF files if read directly from source. FLAC now fully supported. Added support for optional FFmpeg library for import/export of AC3/M4A/WMA and import of audio from video files."

After reading your post I tried zooming over 50% in grid view and iTunes 10.6 crashes EVERY time on my late 2009 mini running 10.6.8. This is the mini I use as my music server. My late 2011 Mini running 10.7.3 does NOT crash when doing the same thing. Otherwise playback on my music serving 2009 Mini has been OK when running Bitperfect and Audirvana. The crash reports are sent to Apple when this crash occurs so I suspect they're well aware of the issue and that a fix is in the works. I rarely use the grid view and don't zoom the size so I would not have discovered this issue unless I'd read stuker's post above.

I've used the stellar series cables from several computer audio interfaces to connect to my Apple HiFi "boom box" and other portable systems. I love my old Apple HiFi box that was discontinued several years ago. Was overpriced when new but a good deal when being closed out. Although it's not exactly portable due to its size and the darn thing is very heavy.

MCM Electronics stellar labs series of cables are nicely made and I've used them in many systems. Their RCA to 1/8" cables are excellent. Check out their 3 ft length for around $12.00 at http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/24-8991. They have them in lengths up to 25 ft I believe. Also be sure to check their catalog source codes on their main page because they usually have some type of sale going on. Of course there are lots of other higher priced cables available but not sure how much difference they will make. Guess it depends on what type of source you're connecting. They are also a good source for 1/4" balanced (TRS) to RCA or XLR cables. These are often needed to connect from Pro Audio computer interfaces. Better to use cables than adapters when you can. I just picked up some good quality Hosa brand cables to connect my new TC Impact Twin to a pair of M-Audio DSM1 powered monitors.

I purchased the TC Impact Twin firewire recording interface a month ago to replace an aging Focusrite Saffite. The TC records up to 24/192 and it also supports playing up to 24/192 files from my Mac Mini. It is designed as a recording interface but makes an excellent computer DAC at a reasonable price. It competes in price with Apogee Duet or Duet II but can be found for less money. The headphone amp in it is also quite good and has plenty of gain for most headphones. My trusty Sennheiser 580s sound excellent driven by it. So here's another one to consider in your hunt. I too have a lot of vinyl I would like to digitize but as everybody says, it is quite labor intensive to do it correctly. In the past I've used my Alesis Masterlink to do this job and it works great. It's a self contained recording, mixing, mastering and CD burning machine. Still an excellent choice for many applications and oftentimes much simpler than working on my computer. Guess it gets down to what you know and what you're comfortable with using. Just read the comment about MiniDisk and I too used my Sony MD quite a lot until recently. I've owned about every type of recording gear starting with a Sony 366 reel to reel I bought in 1972. Still have several Dat decks around the house and I won't let go of my Nakamichi ZX-9 cassette recorder. Good luck with your search for the right solution for you.

Has Chris considered a classified sales or trading area on the site? Maybe that's an area best left for others. Good luck selling your minis. I also have three. Funny how these things seem to multiply. I just "dissected" a late 2009 mini to put in a SSD and 8 gb ram and after holding my breath everything worked once reassembled.

I apologize if I misread your post's intention. No need for a nasty reply. Peace.

This looks like an ad. What do others think?

I recently upgraded 2 Mac minis to 8 gb ram for $40 each so this is now an inexpensive upgrade. Installation is simple on the current and previous models but more difficult "cracking" open the 2008-2009 models. excellent instructions at iFixit.com if you have an older model. Peter